new styles. Ties between the Polish court and the papacy—and during the Schism, with Rome—were
particularly strong. Nicolaus Geraldi de Radom, it so happens, is the name of a priest who was a member
of the Roman curia, the administrative arm of the papal court, under Pope Boniface IX (reigned 1390–
1404). If that is the same Nicolaus de Radom who wrote the Glorias and Credos that were entered into
the Kraków manuscripts two decades later, it would explain not only his mastery of the burgeoning
international style of his day but several musical details as well.
It has been pointed out, for example, that certain Glorias written in Italy at the height of the Great
Schism seem to call attention to it, and to efforts toward its reconciliation, by ejaculating the word pax
(“Peace!”) as a hocket in three voices, each possibly standing for one of the rival claimants to the papal
throne, or their negotiators. To the sue-for-peace Glorias in Italian sources—including one by Johannes
Ciconia, whose connection with the conciliation of the schism we have already noted—we can add one
by Nicolaus de Radom (Ex. 9-25).
EX. 9-25 Nicolaus de Radom, Gloria, mm. 1–20Nor is this by any means the sort of provincial or primitive composition we might be inclined to
expect from an “outlander.” Such expectations, being prejudices, need to be faced and fought along with
all our other preconceptions about the “main stream” of culture. As if expressly to disprove them,
Mikolaj’s Gloria is uniquely original among the Mass Ordinary settings we have encountered, for the
clever—or should we say “subtle”—way it incorporates the characteristic opening gambit of the chace.
But that very uniqueness is in its way typical—the typically playful Ars Nova attitude to genres and their
potential cross-fertilization. Also typically playful is the rhythmic detail, especially the frequent hemiola
shifts—three imperfect semibreves in the time of two perfect ones, indicated in the original with red ink
and signaled in the transcription with brackets. Rhythms like these make implicit reference to the dance.
FAUX-NAÏVETÉ
Such references were made explicit in a special subgenre of chansons that stood at the opposite end of the
rhetorical spectrum from the high-flown ballades associated with the ars subtilior. From the beginning
the ballade was the loftiest of the fixed forms—the direct descendent of the noble canso, whose stanza